What Are the Steps in Ethical Hacking Processes?

Ethical hacking, often called penetration testing, involves cybersecurity professionals who are authorized to imitate attacks to find weaknesses in systems and networks. This practice enables organizations to fortify their security before actual threats take advantage of these weaknesses. If you want to learn more about Ethical Hacking, join Ethical Hacking Course in Bangalore.

Ethical hacking serves as a method to uncover weaknesses in an application, system, or an organization's framework that could be exploited by malicious attackers. This technique is utilized to avert cyberattacks and data breaches by legally infiltrating the systems and identifying weak spots. 

The main advantage of ethical hacking is stopping bad actors from stealing and misusing data. Additionally, it includes Identifying weaknesses by looking at them like an attacker would, which helps in fixing those issues.

The key Steps of ethical hacking include:

1. Reconnaissance(First)

Reconnaissance is the initial and fundamental phase in ethical hacking, sometimes known as footprinting. At this stage, hackers gather various types of data, including details about employees, IP addresses, the structure of the network, and domain names.

Popular tools include:

• Nmap

• Whois

• Maltego

2. Scanning(Second)

After collecting sufficient information, the hacker proceeds to the scanning phase. This stage identifies open ports, active devices, and services within the targeted network. Scanning reveals potential weaknesses that can be exploited. By joining Ethical Hacking Course in Pune, you can get more Knowledge about Ethical Hacking.

Popular tools include:

• Nessus

• OpenVAS

• Angry IP Scanner

3. Gaining Access(Third)

In this stage, the hacker takes advantage of the vulnerabilities found during scanning to gain unauthorized access to the target system. The aim is to obtain various levels of access, from standard user accounts to full administrative privileges.

Popular tools include:

• Metasploit

• SQLmap

• Hydra

4. Maintaining Access(Fourth)

To perform further actions like collecting or monitoring sensitive data, the hacker needs to keep a foothold on the target machine. This often involves installing backdoors, rootkits, or Trojan horses to ensure ongoing access even after the system is rebooted or patched.

Popular Tools include:

• Netcat

• Ngrok

• Empire

5. Clearing Tracks(Fifth)

This phase focuses on making sure the hacker remains undetected. This means deleting logs, hiding files, and altering timestamps to erase any evidence of the attack. The primary goal is to prevent detection and tracing of the hacker's actions.

Popular Tools include:

• CCleaner

• Stealth Rootkit

• Timestomp.

These are the five key steps of the CEH hacking methodology that ethical hackers can use to detect and identify vulnerabilities, find potential open doors for cyberattacks and mitigate security breaches to secure the organizations. To learn more about analyzing and improving security policies, network infrastructure, you can opt for an Ethical Hacking Course in Hyderabad at FITA Academy.